Boston Center for the Arts (BCA) is proud to announce the 2024-2025 lineup of Dance Residents and celebrate its 15th year of dance residency programming. Founded in 2009 by Andrea Blesso, the BCA Director of Dance & Interdisciplinary Arts, the Dance Residency program sparked annual dance-focused support that fosters the creation of new dances by Boston-based artists.
BCA is thrilled to host Cassie Wang and Nailah Randall-Bellinger as the 2024-2025 Boston Dancemakers Residents and welcomes Alexander Davis, Darnell "Snoopy" Brown, and Mira Göksel as this year's Dance Lab at BCA residents.
The incubation model of our residencies allow dancemakers to plant their feet at BCA, then spring from Boston to share their work across New England, the US, and further. The dance programs at BCA have been described as having "changed the landscape of dance in New England" and over the course of their 15 years have supported more than 80 artist collectives and approximately 200 individual dancers.
2024-2025 Boston Dancemakers Residents
Cassie Wang is a multidisciplinary artist exploring various mediums within the framework of contemporary dance performance. Originally from Kansas City, she earned her B.A. from Pomona College in Computer Science with minors in Dance and Media Studies. In her choreographic work, she explores feelings of serendipitous existential intimacy and strives to make the deeply personal feel universal. Her artistic endeavors embody a relentless pursuit for an understanding of Self in relation to surrounding circumstances.
Nailah Randall-Bellinger is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, educator, and founding artistic director of RootsUprising Dance Company based in Boston, MA. She has studied, performed, and lectured throughout the U.S. and abroad including Brazil, Ghana, Haiti, The Czech Republic, and Senegal. With a Masters Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies: Dance and African American literature from Lesley University, Randall-Bellinger's choreographic work is rooted in interdisciplinary research, often drawing from literary and historical source materials. Randall-Bellinger trained with Jamie Nichols, Karen McDonald, Raymond Johnson, and Gerarld McCall in California, in modern, jazz, and ballet. She began her professional performing career in Los Angeles, CA, where she was a performing member of contemporary dance companies: Karen McDonald's New Age Dance Workshop and Jamie Nichols Fast Feet, Inc.
About Boston Dancemakers Residency and its partners
Considered Boston's most comprehensive dance-focused residency, the Boston Dancemakers Residency is designed to support new work from conception to performance. This intensive Dancemakers Residency offers incubation elements for research, experimentation, artistic risk-taking, and growth within the dance industry in a customized manner for the artist's practice. Two choreographers selected for this opportunity will receive support for research, development, rehearsal, production support, marketing and mentorship.
The Boston Dancemakers Residency was created through a partnership between Boston Center for the Arts and Boston Dance Alliance (BDA), a combination of their individual residency programs that comprised a year-long, comprehensive incubator program for dancemakers to make new work in the City of Boston. Like the choreographic process itself, the partnership has continued to evolve with BDA emphasizing the development of crucial business practices to fund and sustain the creative livelihoods of rising dancemakers, through direct service and its growing Fiscal Sponsorship Program, which in 2023 disbursed $330,000 to dozens of dance organizations.
We are delighted to share that this season of the Boston Dancemakers Residency will feature a new sponsorship from Jacob's Pillowfor the retreat element of the program that invites each resident dancemaker to utilize their state-of-the-art Perles studio for a short, focused rehearsal period within their residency year.
2024-2025 Dance Lab at BCA Residents
Alexander Davis is a Boston-based homosexual interested in subverting expectations, heightening the pedestrian, and normalizing queer narratives through fiber and performance. Alex has worked with organizations across Boston including Ryan Landry's Gold Dust Orphans, Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Children's Chorus, Global Arts Live, Improv Asylum/Laugh Boston, and Urbanity Dance, where he served as the Interim Artistic Director for the 2019-2020 Season. As a choreographer and fiber artist Alex has received grant and residency support from The Studios at Mass MoCA, The Boston Foundation, NEFA, The City of Boston, and The Theatre Offensive. Alex assisted choreographer Monica Bill Barnes on Greta Gerwig's Academy Award winning 2019 film Little Women. In 2019 Alex was named City of Boston Artist Fellow. In 2023 Alex earned his MFA from Smith College, where he was a Teaching Fellow from 2021 -2023.
Darnell "Snoopy" Brown is a well-versed freestyle movement artist/choreographer from a Jamaican ethnicity but raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Snoopy became proficient in Hip Hop, Dancehall, and Krump as well as mentored by the best and prominent iconic dancers Such as Russell Ferguson (SYTYCD Winner S8), Mr. Wiggles (Michael Jackson, Usher, Missy Elliot, etc.) and Ian Eastwood (YouTube Sensation & Founder of Young Lions) to name a few. Snoopy catered towards his street styles/teachers and followed up his training which extended into more classical training like ballet, jazz, and modern. Darnell attended Dean College where he studied business & performance arts management with a dance minor.
Mira Göksel (they/them) is an interdisciplinary movement artist from Izmir, Turkey, "currently existing on the land of the Massachusett and Pawtucket Peoples, colonially referred to as Boston, MA." Mira is a choreographer, educator, rehearsal director, casual painter, and a cat mom. They strive for creation rooted in emotional, physical, and social instincts working hand in hand for the most organic outcome in all tenses of creation. Mira is deeply committed to the nurturing of an inclusive space with an investment in mutual support, respect and harmony.